The Mystery of the Turning Waist

The other day, i was reading through a post on wujimon's website about the waist being independent of hips: http://wujimon.wordpress.com/2006/05/12/waist-independent-of-hips/

Experiment time!

Now, as you sit on the chair, try turning to your right, does your hip turn as you turn as you turn your waist?? No right? So this is how it should be or at least how it is taught to me. Turning of the waist should be turning of the waist only and not turning of the hips or buttocks. These should be kept separate. In the classics, they always refer to the waist and not the hips. If they wanted you to turn your body by the hips, they would have said so!

Imagine a rod and a rope of the same thickness, a rod, when you take one corner of it and swing it around, the whole rod gets swung around. But this cannot be considered as " when one part moves, all parts move" right?

On the other hand, if you take a rope at one end and swing it, when one part moves, the power is passed through the whole rope and the whole rope moves! This is what we are looking for. every part of the rope can move independent of all the other parts but can also move together with all the other parts.

Similarly, we should be like that, we should be so song until we are able to control and move all the different parts of the body individually but yet maintaing the link with all the rest of the body. One thing my teacher always demonstrates from his leg up to his kua, waist, chest, shoulder, arms, hands...etc. Which causes us to look like stick men doing taichi.

The reason it is kept separate so that the turning of the waist would not affect your overall centre of gravity or your leg base when you neutralise so that your opponent would not be able to catch your base and throw you whole. The thing is to be dynamic and fluid in your structure and not stagnate in one structure, although it may hold up quite well to attacks. However when you attack, the power should come from your leg base(kua included), passing through and ampifying by your waist all the way to your hands. However this should be done in a split second motion after you listen well to your opponent and see a chance. But then in attacking, you must listen too, at the same time, for any changes in your opponent's movement and deal with it appropriately.